South Carolina Criminal Defense Blog

In U.S. v. Digiovanni, decided July 25, 2011, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court's suppression of drugs based on an unreasonable detention during a traffic stop, holding that the detention exceeded the scope of the traffic stop and that the consent to search was not voluntary.

1) was the traffic stop justified - in this case, the Court found that it was a valid stop for following too closely; and 2) were the officer's subsequent actions reasonably related in scope to the circumstances that justified the stop. In the context of a traffic stop, the officer can detain the driver long enough to request a driver’s license and vehicle registration, run a computer check, and issue a ticket. If the officer wants to hold the driver longer, there needs to be a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity or valid consent.

An officer can ask questions that are unrelated to the purpose of writing a ticket for a traffic violation, but not when the unrelated questioning impermissibly extends the duration of the traffic stop, or "where the police officer 'definitively abandoned the prosecution of the traffic stop and embarked on another sustained course of investigation' or where the unrelated questions 'constituted the bulk of the interaction' between the police officer and the defendant."

In this case, the officer launched into questions unrelated to the traffic stop that were extensive and time-consuming, concerning the defendant's travel plans and the presence of drugs, and it was clear that the officer was conducting a drug investigation and not a traffic-violation investigation. The officer did not even begin the license check until ten minutes into the encounter (the entire length of detention was 15 minutes).

There was no reasonable suspicion to justify the prolonged detention. The officer's reasonable suspicion included:

(1) the car was rented; (2) the car was coming from a known drug source state (Florida); (3) the car was traveling on I-95, a known drug corridor; (4) the car was clean; (5) two shirts were hanging in the rear passenger compartment; (6) there was a hygiene bag on the back seat; (7) Digiovanni’s hands were trembling when he handed over his driver’s license and the rental contract; (6) during the travel history questions, instead of answering the question, "[s]o you’re coming from Florida?," with a "yes," Digiovanni replied, "I have property in Florida"; (8) Digiovanni’s travel itinerary; and (9) Digiovanni’s "oh boy" comment.

The court points out that, as they expressed recently in U.S. v. Foster, they are concerned "about the inclination of the Government toward using whatever facts are present, no matter how innocent, as indicia of suspicious activity," and that the officer's stated reasons for reasonable suspicion are not inherently suspicious at all. (I would point out that the reason the Government tends to put forward whatever facts are present, no matter how innocent, as evidence of reasonable suspicion is because they are used to Courts accepting whatever explanation they give, no matter how absurd.)

The Court also holds that the government did not meet it's burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that the consent to search given by the defendant was voluntary. The officer's false implication that the defendant was bound by consent he had given earlier in the encounter, the officer telling the defendant to "hold on a second" after telling him he was free to go, the extensive questioning concerning drugs during an illegal seizure, the close proximity of the officer, and the officer's authoritative demeanor support the district court's finding that the consent was not voluntary.